Mission:Impossible III

not a M:i:3 poster

A few things come to mind as I start to write this one:

  1. I am going backwards with my reviews, but I figured for completeness sake, I’d do it that way since the other one I am going to write about is V for Vendetta.
  2. Ed is starting to get me in the habit of posting pictures with my posts. I hate the two posters out there because one has too much Tom Cruise and the other has his name too big, plus it’s just a wee bit ugly. However, I decided I needed a picture! Found this one that someone did up as a wallpaper. Works better.
  3. I need to come up with some kind of format for my reviews, observations, thoughts or whatever I want to call them. Maybe I ought to tell you how I felt about it right up front and then get to the meat because I am always going to have spoilers. I’m not here to write up some fancy review that is going to dance around plot details in an effort to tell you what I think without telling you exactly why I think it. This is why I don’t read real film reviews. Of course, I’m not stupid enough to believe you would or would not actually go see or rent or buy a film based on what I think or feel about it either. My ego may be big enough to have my own blog with my name on it in a fairly large font size, but not quite big enough to believe you’d actually care so much about what I write on it to influence you in any way. I think you dig that. If you don’t, then just mutter something and maybe keep reading because here I go to some kind of point…

So, going with that idea, I’ll say up front that it is better than the first and not as good as the second. Wait a minute, I’m sensing a trend here… didn’t I say that about X-Men: The Last Stand? Yes, yes I did. Sorta have an Empire Strikes Back thing going on here. Yes, Jedi is just a tiny bit better than A New Hope. The Ewoks make it a tough call, but I was young enough at the time to not hate them as much as I do now. Everyone agrees that Empire was the best of the three and OMG I am totally on a freakin tangent, and that happens a lot, so bear with me.

You might recall a nice commentation we had going on at The Ed Zone about his Abrams Report aside (I fixed the spelling so J.Po doesn’t have a fit) and I dropped the following quotable:

For M:I-3, Abrams and PSH will get me in the door and I hope it turns out well. Based on the trailer, it looks very good to me, but then I thought that about Starsky and Hutch…

Turns out, that was spot on. Lots of good stuff in the trailers, not much else new in the filling.

Is this like the 1000th movie to rip-off the Tarantino thing of starting with the ending and then building towards it? Okay, not always the ending, but some much later happening event. It was cool the first 10 times it was done and since then, not so much. Especially since what I wanted to happen, didn’t happen. Yeah, here I go with spoilers. This is the last time I will ever warn you in this blog. Okay, I might put that in my About page if I ever get around to writing it.

As hot as Michelle Monaghan — first time I have seen her that I remember, so more please — is, she needed a bullet in her head and her brains all over the room. Why? Because you don’t expect that. This doesn’t happen enough and it needs to. Is it just because it is a Cruise flick and everything turns out great in the end because the aliens say so? I don’t know… probably.

Love Keri Russell, but she died too fast. That was a good combo I wanted to see fight together later on, but bzzt, brain mush. I liked that though because it was unexpected, but in this case, I wanted more. Can someone explain to me why the little brain bomb won’t go off if you are dead? Why does it care? It’s a bomb. It wants to blow up. That’s all they ever want to do.

Not enough Ving. Ving is the man and Luther Stickell is a good character for him. Had some nice banter with Cruise, but could have had more of that. Then again, it might have turned into Lethal Weapon.

Philip Seymour Hoffman got me in the door and he didn’t disappoint. Loved the understated bad guy performance followed up by the excellent death scene. Smashed by car and not shown because Cruise has to save his woman. I like that kind of thing. I also thought the performances turned in by Billy Crudup and Jonathan Rhys Meyers were good. Greg Grunberg was amazing as always.

You could definitely tell that Abrams had his hands all over the thing because there were numerous similarities to his work on Alias. Of course this series is all about the masks and stuff, but it was cool to see them make one on the spot and also that they didn’t go mask crazy like the first two films. Liked some of the other gadgets like those magnetic bombs Ethan was tossing around and the remote control machine guns (almost like Splinter Cell). Ah, and where there is gadgetry there is the quirky tech guy, so instead of Marshall we had Benji and this was well done. Ed and I joked they should have just used Marshall. Okay, even the evil and hidden boss character is taken straight out of Alias.

Speaking of the evil boss thing, it wasn’t hard to figure out. At some point, we realize that the obvious bad guy isn’t the bad guy, even if he makes his subordinates cry. The story was a little stupid in some points. Flying around (again?) on skyscrapers and highly trained guards fooled by baseballs is hard to take sometimes. FianceWife doctor girl with a Glock was a little too good to be true, but I guess Ethan is just that good a trainer, huh? Not that it did Felicity any good in the end, I mean beginning. The bridge scene was cool, but it had me thinking True Lies at the start. I really can’t pick on too much here.

Overall, the main reason I can’t rate this one has high as M:i:2 is because I didn’t hate Cruise as much back then and Abrams isn’t Woo. Don’t get me wrong, I though JJ did a good job here, but he didn’t do as good a job as I think John Woo did.

Anyway, if you didn’t check it out in the theater, then Netflix it or whatever. I own M:i:2, but I don’t know if I’ll pick this one up when the time comes. Might be a candidate to waste some X-Mas cash on when I pick up X3. I guess we’ll see.